50,000 years ago
40,000
Present
20,000
30,000
10,000
2
Southeast Asia 6
Siberia 18
East Africa 22
East Asia 1
South Asia 13
Central Asia 30
The Americas 2
Total Sample 193 volunteers
Southern Europe 10
Middle East 54
Northern Europe 33
West Africa 4
South Asia
Middle East
The Astoria section of Queens, New York, is
one of the most ethnically diverse communities
on Earth. At the 30th Avenue Street Festival in
July 2008, people of all heritages and complexions
mingled among booths offering up Thai charms
and Peruvian sweaters, Mexican corn and Italian
zeppole. The sun was hot, the mood merrily
multicultural. Through the crowd walked a tall,
blond man with pale skin rapidly turning red.
He stopped occasionally to talk to people, and if
he found them obliging, asked if they could spare
a few cells from the inside of their cheeks.
For the past four years Spencer Wells and
his colleagues with National Geographic and
IBM's Genographic Project have been traveling
the globe, collecting DNA in cheek swabs and
blood samples from hundreds of indigenous
groups. By comparing their DNA, the project has
been retracing the ancient history of human
migrations since our species originated in Africa
some 200,000 years ago.
The Genographic Project focuses on the
Y chromosome in males, which is handed down
intact from father to son, and on mitochondrial
DNA (mtDNA), which a mother passes to her
offspring. Over generations, small, harmless
mutations accumulate on these two snippets of
DNA; to Wells and other scientists these genetic
markers constitute a history book. As ancient
human populations migrated out of Africa,
GRAPHIC: OLIVER UBERTI AND M. BRODY DITTEMORE, NG STAFF
PHOTOS: STEVE WINTER
Michelle
Brown-Johnston
Alma Mujezinovic
Atsushi Mizukami
Pedro Aguilar
Four-fifths have lineages that
traversed the Middle East.
Most of those lineages branched into other regions
before arriving, much more recently, in Queens.